Data buses are used in integrated circuits (ICs) to connect a plurality of master devices, such as user-controlled microprocessors, to a plurality of peripherals, such as memories. For example, a data bus may be an Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) from ARM Limited of Cambridge, England. Additionally, the data bus may be an Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) that uses an Extended Interface (AXI) protocol from ARM.
To avoid overlapping data messages transferred from the master devices to the peripherals, an arbiter is often used to manage traffic on the data bus. In bus systems such as AHB or AXI, only one master can have active access to the bus at a time for a connection to a peripheral connected to the bus.